Two men stood over him, aroused and grinning as men stand over the women in a newly taken town. Another was climbing off — the centurion, by his badges — and one of the standing men was lifting the hem of his tunic, working himself to readiness. He was the same Blood-mouth we had faced in the mule stockade.
‘ Tears! ’ Screaming his name as my battle cry, I hurled myself at Blood-mouth with all the force and fury of a bull at a field cur, taking his chest squarely with my shoulder and ramming the hilt end of my gladius up into his solar plexus. As he went down, I jabbed my elbow in under his kidneys. He didn’t even grunt, he had so little air to breathe.
Lupus and Syrion had taken the other standing man, Lupus holding his shoulders, Syrion sweeping his feet out from under him. He fell lengthways, even as I swung myself past, using a set of shelves as a lever. I heard his head hit the stone floor.
The centurion was the last and slowest to respond. He was newly sated, dull-eyed, too fogged in his mind to think clearly. I kicked him in the gut with all the ache of Tears’ cry behind it, and then reached for Tears who had risen and fallen again, or seemed so to have done.
But when I hauled him upright, there was blood on his hands, and a glimmer of iron, and the small, bronze-handled knife with the wren on the hilt was slick with crimson, and the centurion had a wound in his chest, over his heart, barely the width of my thumb. Blood oozed from his mouth. I saw death steal the light from his eyes.
‘Give that to me!’ I grabbed the knife from Tears, spun him away, saw in passing the marks of ropes on his wrists, the welts across his back where they had misused him before the centurion made him his own.
Ungainly, I shoved my friend back against the wall, and set my own naked blade against the centurion’s chest, stripping away the last paltry strands of wool so that when I stood again, and Lupus was there to meet me, I could say, ‘I killed him.’
Lupus said nothing, only pinched the bridge of his nose, and blew out a blood clot, and wiped the mess away with the back of his hand. Absently, he cleaned himself on the centurion’s new bed hides.
Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead. So had said the prefect, who was due to make his visit in a day’s time.
Lupus’ eyes fed on my face, then inched away. I heard Tears draw a breath.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Be silent.’
‘Yes,’ Lupus said, ‘be silent. Both of you.’ He looked down. ‘This man is a prisoner,’ he said. ‘We’ll take him with us. You’ — he pointed to Syrion and me — ‘wrap him tightly and bind him so he can’t escape. You’ — this to Tears — ‘dress fast. We must leave swiftly, before the others regain consciousness.’
We said nothing, any of us, only let our glances slide off each other, so that nothing was spoken between us, even silently. Tears was dressed by the time we had trussed the centurion as if he were, in fact, alive, and able to escape. We bound him in hides and Syrion and I raised him to our shoulders like a battering ram.
‘Follow,’ Lupus said, and led us out of the door.
We did not run from the enemy compound, but we marched faster than I had ever done before and came sooner than I might have wanted to Cadus’ camp. There, we did not pause, but gathered Horgias and Sarapammon and the giant Proclion and poor Polydeuces, who had become ‘the Rabbit’ and already knew he would never lose the name.
‘What will you do with the Eagle?’ Cadus asked it of Lupus, but he was watching my face, trying to read me. I held myself unreadable.
Lupus said, ‘If you could deliver it back to them tomorrow, I would be grateful; we have no need of it now. Tell them if they want their officer before the prefect’s visit, they can bargain for him.’
We left swiftly, Syrion and I still carrying our bundle, which was clearly a man and perhaps not clearly dead.
I remember nothing of the march back. It must have happened, for we reached our own camp just as the first knife’s edge of light cut the night from the eastern sky. I had cramp in my right arm, from holding tight to a dead weight, and I fancied I could feel warm blood on my skin, though it could as easily have been urine, or something more foul.
At the gates to our camp, we halted. Lupus had given no order, but we dared not go in, for fear of what looting might have occurred in our absence.
Nothing had happened — the earlier units had returned as they had been told and held our camp safe; we found that almost immediately. Lupus himself walked forward, and took the salute from the leading man and came out again. We could read him now, in ways we never had before. We saw his relief, his almost-joy, and we cheered him though the soundcame ragged from our throats for it was over a day since we had rested, and we had fought hard in between.
He waited for us to be still. The sun was on him, lighting the bruise that marred half his face. He looked wild, and savage, and a far more genial man than he had been a day before.
He signalled Sarapammon and the Rabbit. ‘Take the men inside. See to the wounded, build fires, cook whatever we have to eat. There is some ale in my tent. Share it out equally.’
‘Where are you going?’ It was a sign of how different we were that Sarapammon dared ask.
‘We’re taking our prisoner somewhere safer,’ Lupus said. ‘The Fourth may launch a counter-attack. I would not want him too easily retaken.’
Nobody argued. As they turned to go in, they, too, were avoiding each other’s glances, preparing what they were going to say.
I still had no idea what I was going to say, except that I killed him, that Tears was not capable of it, that I would kill Tears myself with my bare hands if he tried to take the guilt to himself; better to die fast at the hands of a friend than under the prefect’s bullhide whip.
Tears was not carrying anything, but Lupus made him come with us. We four left the camp and walked west, up into the high peak, towards the goat path that we had followed a day-become-eternity ago, to find where the IVth had set their ambush.
We squeezed through the narrow channel, barely wide enough to fit the centurion’s body, and came out the other side, to the place where the mountain fell away and we could see down on to clouds still sunk in night; dawn had not reached them yet.
‘Untie him.’ Lupus moved away to sit on an outcrop of rock. He didn’t look for it, but sat with familiarity, as if thiswas a place he came often to watch the sun go down, or to count the tiny insects that scratched and sprang along the valley floor, and were, in fact, goats, and antelopes, and the beasts that hunted them.
We untied the centurion and laid him out on the hides that had been his bed. He looked ridiculous in death, with his tunic still bunched above his waist and his member flaccid. His skin was perfectly white, blotched in places where he had lain against us. It was urine that had pooled on my neck. I swept it clear with snow.
Lupus stood and came across and with his own hands lifted the man by his heels and swung him round. It took him perilously close to the edge. Stepping back, he held on to the mountain behind with one hand and placed his sandalled foot against the dead man’s head.
‘ Given of the god,
Given to the god,
Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.
May you journey safely to your destination.’
It was the prayer spoken over the grave of a fallen soldier. Lupus spoke it like a benediction, as if the man had been his heart’s friend. Then he shoved his foot out, sharply.
The centurion sailed over the edge. He was a log, turning end over end in a waterfall; a tree, falling from a precipice; he was a man, falling so far, bouncing, coming apart on the rocks, an arm ripped off here, a long peel of skin there; the snow was bloody to the snow line, and then the winter-dried earth was bloody beyond it. If he hit the bottom, we could not see it.
‘He tried to retrieve his legion’s Eagle and then escape,’ Lupus said. ‘It was an honourable act, worthy of the officer he was, but sadly he did not know the terrain and so fell. Such will be my report. A man who falls off the mountain is deemed to have killed himself, so nobody bears any guilt, but I will suggest that, because he was our prisoner, we will pay for a tablet to be erected in his name beyond the walls of the camp.’